South Carolina Will Place Ads Inside School Buses

South Carolina will begin selling ad space inside their public school buses—11-inch strips above the windows are now for sale, and “Interested school districts get about $2,100 per month per bus.”

The South Carolina Board of Education approved the plan last month, and appears to be moving forward with it.

“I never thought [advertising inside school buses] was a good idea to start with,” said Donald Tudor, South Carolina’s DOE School Transportation Director, “but when you run a state program and districts request this be set in motion, you do it so they can make a choice. Ultimately, I couldn’t think of a good reason why they shouldn’t have the option.”

For its part, SAC promises the ads will be age-appropriate, promote a healthy and productive life, and are directly approved by district appointed personnel. Ads sold thus far are from local businesses.

People might complain about this, but in reality its a indicator of where our priorities are in this country. They aren’t putting ads up in buses because they are corporate shills. It’s because they don’t have money. With schools now pulling soda out of cafeterias, they have to compensate for that revenue somewhere else.

If you don’t like the ads, then attack the actual problem not the symptom. Get more money to schools.

Where is that picture from? It looks like the inside of a school bus (note the yellow exterior), and I noticed a “Six Flags Great America” ad, which indicates Suburban Chicago. Is someone in my neck of the woods already doing this? Or is it a photoshop job?

Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. And as proved by the local Bus Radio discussions here in Denver parents and educators simply don’t give a shit – and our more concerned with people “rocking the boat” and giving their school districts a bad name.

Our country seems to be taking backwards steps. The fact that we have trillions of dollars for war but school districts can’t find the money to give children a proper education says a lot about the United States.

Of course I don’t blame just the government for not giving education enough money. I remember when I was in school we were rationing paper and supplies (e.g. any test the teachers gave you had to write on your own paper then give the test back because the school couldn’t afford for every student to have a copy), but at the same time they were putting a lot of work into making the football and baseball stadiums top of the line.

The problem seems to start at the top with not enough money being allocated for schools, then the money gets sucked up by beaurocrats before it reaches the teachers and students. Plus you also have the issues of schools only really doing things to look good to parents (e.g. zero tolerance policies), and a lot of other problems that are too long to list in these comments.

Instead of prilosec, the pharma companies should probably be pushing their new Hannah Montana blood sugar monitors. It’s one thing for schools to accept ad revenue from companies like Sylvan Learning Center and Kaplan, but this is pretty repugnant.

They wound up pulling a lot of the soda machines out because as it turns out, Coke takes a much bigger chunk of the change and the schools make far less than they were led on to believe. I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar happens here. They’ll wind up paying the schools for placement and then charging all kinds of hidden maintenance fees.

I can’t imaging my knucklehead riding a bus and taking the time to read these things. Unless they are physically attached to a girl, he probably won’t notice.

At 13, he doesn’t do much of our household shopping; this is advertising to the wrong market and I imagine it won’t be long until these ads show up on the commuter bus I ride to and from work every day.

I don’t really have a problem with this other then the fact it shows how the schools need more money. I kinda agree with what someone elce said about putting the ads on the outside of the bus. Makes sence.

I would imagine that the adds would do much better on the outside of the bus.

As long as the adds were actually for good/educational/activity type things like a museum, a bike/skate board/sports equipment company, milk, or even a sporting goods store or the discovery channels I don’t have a big problem.

What’s the point? Any adverts are going to be drawn on and covered in spitballs and god only knows what else by the end of the first day. It’d be somewhat less bad if they were using the revenue to, oh I dunno, maybe install some seatbelts?

FRY: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written in the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!

@forgottenpassword: I think it will be in-class product placement.1st grade Teacher: Today class we will be learning about addition. Turn your text books to page 57.Teacher: If Johnny has 4 cans of Delicious Coca-Cola >, and Suzie has 2 cans of refeshing Sprite, now with Zero Calories and no Caffine, how many cans of soda do they have all together?

Sammy : They have 6 cans all together.

Teacher: Good Job Sammy, now why don’t you come up here and select a delicious Coca-Cola product from our in-class cooler, and remember, tell your Mommy and Daddy that Coke is the REAL Thing! Class Dismissed.

Ads on the bus would have caused me a serious case of civil disobedience, well ok, vandalism. What a great place for some selective sign replacement. Explain the evils of high fructose corn syrup in everything. Why being a mindless buying sheep is a bag thing. Break down the evils of sub prime credit cards.

First off, $2100 per month is nothing. They should be paying more, like $5000 per month per bus.
I don’t have any qualms with coke, pepsi, Great America, etc sticking ads inside schoolbusses. Why not? Because ads are EVERYWHERE. You get ads on tv, ads on billboards, ads on side of buildings, ads on bus shelters, ads in malls, in newspapers, plus, I am sure there are pepsi and coke vending machines a the school. Might as well try to get some money from it.
The thing I don’t quite understand is how we can send trillions of dollars to Iraq and build up their schools and municipalities and communities, yet, when it comes to our own country, we don’t have any money even for schooling, so that they have to resort to putting ads inside schoolbusses to generate extra revenue.

I like to be in countries where I am not bombarded with advertising at every turn. I won’t be raising a family in the U.S. for that reason, and many others. It’s so nice to be in a peaceful city with minimal advertising. Sure, there is some, but nothing approaching the U.S.

The schools need money – and most people fight any type of tax increase to give schools more money – so if they can get advertisers to pay some money for something as simple as placing small ad’s in the bus – then YEA!

(as long as they are appropriate ads – don’t need no Viagra ad’s or stuff like that)

@Chris Walters: Chris, I think you should have mentioned this was a photoshop and not an actual example of the practice. It seems deceptive and wrong to put a photo of something that will clearly turn the conversation against the idea (if it wasn’t there already) (and admittedly, it’s a bad idea). But worse, it’s like being lied to by a friend, the Consumerist.

This is deplorable. I know schools are always looking for more revenue sources, but this should never have been an OPTION. At the risk of sounding like “Will someone please think of the children!”, you’re actively advertising to little children who have no concept of how the consumer nation works, or probably even an allowance to buy the products themselves. It’s just flashy signs that try to get the kid to pester their parents continuously until they get the thing for them, and they probably have no idea what the heck they want IS besides they saw it on the school bus!

High school students might be old enough to make consumer decisions, but that’s not to say that they’re not impressionable.

Can we just agree that even if we are a nation of consumers that there is in fact a line to be drawn and South Carolina just blew past it?

I highly doubt kids are going to pay attention to them anyway. After all, students on a bus are (supposed) to face front and ahead. I don’t see them staring at the walls of the bus through the whole ride. If the ads were on the back of the seats or something like that, that would be a whole different matter.

This is the most boring repost of another site’s story I have ever seen. Are there no writers here? The monkey avatar is fitting, since that is all it takes to cut & paste.The COMMENTERS have a better sense of original commentary, at least.

1. No ads should appear where the government mandates your presence. It is a government endorsement of a product or viewpoint. (And I doubt that they will take every ad that someone will pay for. No KKK ads I assume).

2. Money is not the answer to every school problem. Many schools do better than others with less money.

3. Schools want money, fire the old and ineffective teachers that have been around since the 60’s

@Antediluvian: Agreed. This photo is fake and needs to be labeled as so. Not everyone is going to read the comments to find out that the image isn’t real. Likewise, not everyone is going to realize it’s a joke.

@arcticJKL: you make great points on #1 & #2 & then break out the soundboard for #3. i challenge that it’s not the teachers & instead the management of these schools that’s ineffective. school officials used to be educators. now they are business managers. in my neck of the woods, superintendents are making $250,000/year (4 year contract) when teachers are starting at $35,000. 2 nearby districts are contemplating consolidation into regional schools DESPITE $100,000+ feasibility studies that suggest against it. no problem, just commission another study until we get one that says this is a good idea. the feds are reducing their funding, the state is reducing their funding, & the mandates increase. everyone MUST be educated, no matter the cost (just don’t ask us to pay). the fed now dictates curriculum with a scantron form. do we even have teachers anymore or are they simply “test facilitators”?

@Chris Walters: Chris, the very first comment seemed to believe the photo. At least, the first comment was directly in response to the pic, as did many of the rest. I thought it was real, since it wasn’t so over the top — like advertising phone sex lines or Hooters “restaurants” or credit cards.

So yes, good ‘shopping skills, but please use them for good, not evil?

As we all know on this site, an organization’s credibility is easily lost and hard to regain.

Who’s getting screwed here ? I would posit that the dumb ass companies that buy these ads are wasting their money.I haven’t been on a school bus since the 70’s , but my kids tell me that everyone that is old enough is plugged in to their Ipod ,talking, fighting or just skimming the latest issue of Hustler… These companies can’t compete with that with their lame single dimensional ads. We had the same reaction when Channel One invaded our schools and the number of kids that pay attention to that turd wouldn’t fill out a baseball team.Kids (and their parents) are pitched to from the time they get up until they go nighty night every damn day. These ads are wallpaper to them. To be sure, the school districts are shameless whores for doing this,but is anybody really paying attention ? Just my two cents…

Seems like a fair source of revenue for school systems. Kids are inundated with ads anyway. TV, internet, radio, etc. But is this attractive ad space? Anything associated with school is a turn-off to many kids. I don’t think they’ll suddenly see something as cool if it is on an ad in a grimy school bus

For everyone who’s saying how horrible this is, here’s the alternative: Fund your schools. Support property tax levies that are reasonable and help your schools avoid selling out. Push your state and national elected representatives to do a better job of funding schools. School districts aren’t resorting to this because they want to brainwash your kids with ads. They likely hate it, but are desperate.

I’m pretty sure that the picture Consumerist used is a photoshop rendition, and the article should have given note of that. If those were the kinds of ads that were present on those busses, I would be offended.

But as someone who uses public transportation on a regular basis, I don’t really see a problem with ads on busses. I live in Portland, Oregon, and we have one of the best public transit systems in the US. All of the vehicles used – the busses, Streetcar, and MAX trains – have ads on the inside and outside of them. Most of the ads that I’ve seen have been for local business, and I really don’t have a problem with it.

The fact is, schools need money. It saddens me to think that they have to do this in order to secure more funding, but I can think of worse things that a school district could do to raise money (e.g. having coke machines in the lunch rooms of Jr. Highs and High School, which my district had). Ads are everywhere, and if they are local business adverts I really don’t see an ethical issue with it. Busses are spendy, and all the other public transit has ads all over it…

@alphafemale: Before seatbelts, they could give the stupid things a tune-up. I’m sure the rising rates of childhood asthma have absolutely *nothing* to do with 5 gallons of diesel soot being poured into the kids’ lungs every day.

I thought they already tried this kind of thing before. At one point about 10 years ago, some company tried giving all the schools a free TV network…the catch being that it had commercials aimed at kids. I think there was also a “bus radio” service that did the same thing..gave the kids free music on the way to school, mixed with advertisements aimed at kids.

As an SC resident, here’s a few clarifications:
* any money goes to the local school district
* the school district gets to approve the ads
* each district decides individually whether they will run ads or not
so it’s not entirely crazy.

I’ll probably be pissed off when my daughter comes home and wants a thing that she saw on the school bus — but considering how much other advertising she will see in her life, and how easy it is to say, “no, dear, that’s a worthless waste of money and I’m not buying it”, I will manage to survive :)

Now: I’m having trouble understanding your interpretation. The photo is clearly an editorial comment on the practice–hence the dramatically overstated inclusion of kid-specific advertising (junk food, six flags) and random mis-targeted advertising (Prilosec). I even included a visual joke about Wal-Mart buying advertising in the busâ€”a joke because Wal-Mart is notorious for not buying advertising at the local level, which I believe to be common knowledge among at least a certain subset of readers.

The image is indeed meant to comment negatively on the practice of placing ads in buses. I personally am against it, and I think Consumerist philosophically is against this sort of practice. I think it should be self-evident that targeting children with advertisements when they’re a captive audience, as part of a government-mandated situation, is unsavory, at the very least. I deliberately created an image that communicates that opinion.

If you read my posts regularly, however, you’ll note I frequently make such editorial comments with photographs, which is why I’m surprised you’d consider this one unethical or damaging to the blog’s credibility. Editorially doctored photographs are one of the things that makes this a blog instead of a newsmag, and sets us apart from stuffy, by-the-books MSM.

Finally, I am against labeling photoshopped pics as such for a couple of grouchy reasons:
1. I think it insults the intelligence and humor of our readers;
2. I think it’s caving in to a litigious, too-easily-offended society that demands warnings and confessions on everything.

What I did do, after thinking about your comments and reading the multiple misinterpretations, was change the headline so that it’s clear SC’s ad program is in the future, making it more evident that the photo can’t be real. And I added a caption to the photo to make it clearer it’s fantasy. Hopefully this resolves the problem for all of us.

Chris, the reason I think this particular picture is misleading and bad for the blog is because it DOESN’T look over the top. It looks real. The ad choices are actually ones that could be installed — even the Prilosec (either intentionally or through a mis-buy by the ad agency). Six Flags, Walmart, Coke — these guys already aim their ads at kids (less so Walmart, but not by much), and Coke certainly does lots of local buys, and often in or near schools (scoreboards, banners, backstops, etc).

You’re absolutely, completely spot-on that doctored pics are useful for expressing the opinions of this blog and its authors — hell, it’s “your” blog, I’m just a guest and no one is forcing me to read anything (yet) — and that the pics CAN and sometimes SHOULD indicate the slant of the item (pro or con, good or bad, etc).

But this one went too far because it was too real-looking. It wasn’t over the top — it was exactly what someone might expect to see. People complained about the specific ads included in the “program” based on the pic — in the very first post, and even in one right after yours where you discuss the ‘shopping (that could have happened due to timing of posting, but it still shows that people “fell for” the pic even after the discussion made it clear it was a mock-up).

I don’t think you should stop making pics that express your opinion. I just don’t remember any previous pics that were so lifelike attached to a contentious topic.

It also feels bad to a reader (well, to me anyway) to have formed an opinion of something based on the associated pic only to learn later that the pic was unrelated to the topic, so the opinion needs to be re-thought. It’s like negative campaign advertising. Not because I can’t change my mind, or rethink something, but because it feels like I was lied to. Again, by the realism.

If you’d done the same image without the blurring of the right side and the perspective angle tweaking (I think that’s the name of the tool — perspective angle tweaker), so it looked like someone used MS Paint instead, it would likely have been an obvious mock up. But there would still be the question of whether the mock up was from the bus ad company or from the Consumerist. You folks often post pics that are screen caps of news stories.

I think it could have been solved also by slapping some text / a caption on the pic that said “Coming soon?” or something. If the ads had been nicely ‘shopped all over every surface of the bus — seats, roof, floor — that would have been okay too, since no one would believe they’d put ads everywhere.

Oh, another option that might have been great would have been ads that said in bold letters “Consume” “Buy” “Spend”. Maybe add in, “We have always been at war with Eastasia” for effect. Victoria’s Secret, Hooters, Trojan, “Vote Ron Paul” [he wants to dismantle the federal Dept of Education] etc could have helped make it clear it was fake.

I do understand, and appreciate, the idea of making it look as real as possible to convey the idea that such advertising is a bad concept. But even The Sun and other tabloids include some sort of disclaimer if the pic is made to look real.

See, I think it all comes down to the idea that of the pics with the articles are from the linked stories or some sort of funny flickr pool pics, or something totally off the wall, or clearly real or not real — the metal debris in a prescription bottle, for an example from today, or the keyboard through the CRT, or the pic of the Capital One sign. The pic of the Spring letter, with the highlighting of “concerned department” is real, right? Looks real, and matches the text of the blurb to the right. So I assume it’s real. Same deal with the bus ads. Looks real, right? I assume it’s real, it matches the text of the blurb to the right (“11 inch strips above windows”).

I think you can’t mix real-looking pics that are fake and real-looking pics that are real together without making people question them more often.

To your “grouchy reasons” for not wanting to label ‘shopped pics, I mostly agree — if the shop job is obvious. Please, do keep putting pointed or leading pics with the articles — that’s a good thing (plus, I like the cat ones too — hi Meg). But just be careful when you use your photoshopping skills.

I also think this discussion is good, too.

I think this is about it; it’s hard to edit in a text box only 11 lines high — I haven’t installed whatever Firefox extension it is that lets me make it larger; didn’t honestly think I’d need it. :-)

They showed channelone in my high school too, and we were FORCED to sit and watch it and this was 10 years ago for me. We couldn’t even do our homework (or sleep) during the homeroom period, we had to sit and watch that garbage for 15 min each morning. I went to a catholic high school. I think the deal was that if they showed channelone, that channelone would install TV’s in each classroom thus the school got free TV’s. It was also supposed to be “educational” because they discussed current events.